Thread: the OFF TOPIC to Stags shot 21 (discussion of wild animal management)

Originally Posted by gimp

I don't think the statement that is commonly made that recreational hunters can't manage deer numbers is necessarily accurate; a more accurate way to describe the situation in the Sumner RHA or Ruahines for example might be that hunters haven't been incentivised to try to manage deer numbers. Hunters as a group don't have the specific goal of managing numbers to a target in any area, so of course they haven't - but these targets don't exist for deer, neither does any monitoring to determine populations at a park level like this in most places.

You could say the same about tahr as well, although target intervention densities do exist there, the system has not worked well in terms of ongoing monitoring informing direction of recreational hunter effort, and then that effort actually being applied.

There are plenty of places particularly in the South Island where deer numbers remain low (based on my anecdotal experience rather than formal data) since they were reduced or eliminated by WARO in the 70s, and one could safely say that some of this is due to recreational hunter effects as there really isn't any data to support any other assumption over that.

Clearly the difficulty of managing deer numbers will vary significantly with different landscapes. Fiordland much more difficult than the Two Thumb Range.

But problems with the ruhnies on the western side is that there isn't a lot of access points & 3 have close in the last few years & a lot of the acces points are through farm land so in the winter time it gets closed depending on there farm operation at the time so it hard to keep numbers under control when you can't get in there